He was cancelled by Britain over his transgender views – and has moved to America to rebuild his life.
Now we can reveal Graham Linehan is to quit the UK for good and is seeking asylum in the US as a free speech refugee.
The Father Ted creator’s lonely battle against online trolls has destroyed his career in entertainment, lost him most of his friends and caused the break-up of his 16-year marriage to fellow writer Helen Serafinowicz.
A planned musical version of Father Ted was never made because he refused to have his name removed from the credits.
Earlier this week, after he was dramatically arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow and treated like ‘a terrorist’ hauled off to a cell. His crime? For three social media posts while living in the US.
Irish-born Linehan, 57, who spent 30 years living in the UK, was returning this week to face trial after being accused of harassing a transgender woman with abusive comments and damaging her phone.
The comedy genius IT Crowd, Black Books and Motherland, was flying back from Arizona where he has made a new life for the past six months.
In the court papers, Linehan gave an address that is in a luxury apartment complex in central Scottsdale, where his two-bedroom flat rents for around £2,600 a month. Scottsdale is known as an enclave of ‘free speech’.
‘Cancelled’ Father Ted comedy writer Graham Linehan (pictured) has quit Britain for a new life in Arizona – and is seeking asylum in the United States as a ‘free speech refugee’
When Linehan arrived back in the UK this week to face court in another case, he was stopped by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport who quizzed him over the tweets he posted
Linehan posted these three tweets in April for which he was was arrested over earlier this week
Linehan’s life in Scottsdale, which boasts an average of 300 days of sunshine a year, could not be more different from the small docklands flat in south London where he lived after the break-up of his marriage in 2020.
The ‘resort-style living’ includes an indoor and outdoor pool in the complex, a gym, a rooftop spa, sun deck and numerous trees designed to make the place feel like an ‘oasis’.
He also has access to more than six acres of landscaped paths and walkways, indoor basketball court, on-site personal training, a putting green and a rooftop outdoor theatre.
Should the stress of his situation get too much, he can chill out in the outdoor spa and steam rooms.
He has formed a production company, Friendly Fire, with former Saturday Night Live star Rob Schneider and Northern Irish playwright and journalist Andrew Doyle, and filming on their new comedy called Tenure is set to begin within weeks.
Republican Schneider, who once played Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo in the 1999 film of the same name, is something of a kindred spirit with Linehan when it comes to their transgender views.
In 2023 he clashed with transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, calling her transgender identity ‘cultural appropriation’.
Schneider this week revealed that Linehan has hired MAGA lawyer Aaron Siri over the asylum bid to appeal to President Donald Trump.
After Linehan’s arrest Schneider announced on X: ‘This morning, our attorney at Friendly Fire Studio, @AaroSiriSG, will ask the Trump Administration to give Asylum to Graham Linehan as a UNITED KINGDOM FREE SPEECH REFUGEE’.
It is not clear which visa Linehan could be granted, or if the Trump administration would give him a green card, which allows for permanent residency.
However, Donald Trump has prioritised resettlement to the US for groups he considers marginalised, including white Afrikaners from South Africa who he claimed were being subjected to ‘genocide’ back home.
The lawyer Linehan has turned to Siri is a vaccine sceptic who works closely with US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Siri said this week that he was ‘confident he (Linehan) will be able to flee the persecution’ in the UK.
In a statement to the Daily Mail, Siri said: ‘We have been in contact with Mr. Linehan. We have a robust immigration practice at the firm. We are confident he will be able to immigrate to the United States and flee the persecution and abject infringement of his fundamental right to free speech’.
Siri also took aim at Britain’s record when it came to free speech.
He said: ‘The UK’s increasing disregard for this fundamental right is disturbing. The UK is already ranked as more illiberal than Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay when it comes to free speech, and is on the fast track to becoming less liberal in permitting speech than Tunisia or Iran’.
Amid a growing backlash, his supporters are calling for a new ‘Linehan’s Law’ to ensure no British citizen ‘is ever arrested, silenced or gagged for expressing lawful speech’.
His friend Doyle said: ‘There can no longer be any doubt that free speech is on life-support in Britain, and to keep ignoring the sheer weight of evidence is a labour of perversely Herculean proportions.
‘Many commentators are claiming that the arrest of Graham Linehan could be a tipping point, but this will only be true if the public’s rising frustration can be directed into action.
‘It has been grotesque to witness the state’s ongoing harassment of an acclaimed comedy writer, but perhaps one consolation is that it might finally jolt Westminster out of its complacency.’
He said Linehan had been a victim of ‘a concerted effort by trans activists to weaponize the police’ which had been ‘aided by the ideological capture of law enforcement’.
Since seeing his career and his marriage ended over his outspoken trans views, Lineham quietly left the UK six months ago to rebuild his life in Arizona where he is renting an apartment
When he appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this week, he listed his permanent address in the ‘free speech enclave’ of Scottsdale near Arizona where he is staying
The comedy writer is renting a two-bedroom flat for £2,600 a month in a luxury complex
Described as ‘resort-style living’, the complex includes an outdoor pool and rooftop spa
Mr Doyle added: ‘The misuse of police powers has been bad enough, but it has been accompanied by Graham’s broader cancellation by the very industry that once feted him.’
Linehan moved to Arizona because the US, in his words, ‘values free speech’ but the UK does not.
He was spending time there as early as January last year when he posted from a neighbourhood in northern Scottsdale, Arizona.
Other posts praise Grimaldi’s, a restaurant chain, as serving the ‘greatest pizza I’ve ever had’ and about meeting right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson.
In a post on X in December, Linehan said had been ‘visiting Arizona over the last year and I love it’, so much so he was moving there full time.
He said: ‘It’s very exciting to land in a new place where you don’t have any of the baggage that I have over here.
‘There’s a lot of opportunities Rob (Schneider) is going to be able to provide in terms of script editing, which I’ve always loved.
‘One of the reasons I’m leaving is freedom of speech is really bad in the UK. I would not be able to get anything on television in the UK but with police coming to people’s houses for Tweets.
‘The US is a good place for me, it seems to be a place where people value freedom of speech and in the UK they gave up on that a few years ago and the results are around for us all to see’.
Linehan said he ‘mourns’ the fact the Father Ted musical won’t be made as it was his ‘masterpiece’ but others who worked on the show didn’t want to collaborate with him.
Linehan said: ‘The other reason I don’t want to remain in the UK is I’m so disgusted with what the entertainment industry has turned into over here. A bunch of cowards who look the other way while whole generations of kids were hurt. I don’t want to work with them’.
According to Linehan, the final straw behind his move to the US was the reaction the day before to health secretary Wes Streeting putting an indefinite ban on puberty blockers.
He said that writing comedy again was ‘good news’ and said that for him there were ‘big things afoot, a new life ahead’.
Back in London, neighbours told how Linehan packed up his belongings and moved out of a luxury £700,000 quayside flat in Rotherhithe, south east London after his marriage and career were left in tatters.
Before Linehan made the move to Arizona permanent, he made several visits to the area which he documented on social media – and had a farewell before going at the Free Speech Union
One local who lived in the modern development told the Daily Mail: ‘He said he’d had enough. He said he was going to live in Arizona and he wasn’t coming back. That’s the last I saw of him.’
In a podcast last month on Spiked, Linehan spoke candidly – and sadly about why he felt he had to leave the UK, taking aim at Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the ‘Middle Classes’, as well as former showbiz colleagues.
On working in the US, he said: ‘Oh, it’s like being able to breathe for years of being suffocated.
‘I realized quite late on is that I wasn’t just expelled out of comedy, I was expelled out of the middle classes. The middle classes did not like me upsetting their dinner party conversation, so they rejected me like an owl rejecting a pellet.
‘The UK is almost impossible for someone like me to live in. You cannot tell the truth without the police coming to your door.
‘I just feel the place is not a friendly or welcoming, or it’s not the place I came to in the 90s. There used to be a really exciting kind of creative cultural life, and now the cultural life is cancelling authors
‘It’s not a creative place. It’s not a happy place. I feel like the the various tensions that exist at the moment are sure to explode next year, you know, I think something’s going to happen, and that scares me a lot.’
By contrast, he said he feels at home in Arizona.
‘America is a very different place. Each state is going to be different, but Arizona certainly, you know, there’s nothing but support.
‘In the UK, they don’t know about it because it’s deliberately been kept from them by the BBC and The Guardian and every liberal outlet. It’s only telling them good news. It never tells them bad news about the trans issue.
‘But over here, it’s different. Everybody knows about it, and everybody’s just onside. It’s just a feeling of, what the hell? How could that have happened to you that’s insane?
‘At last, I’m with people who think it’s insane that I got treated the way I did.’
He contrasted his eight years of not working with the fact he has now embarked on a new TV show.
‘I feel like I don’t ever want to work in the UK again. I don’t ever want to work with a UK production simply because the UK has behaved so abominably in the last 10 years.
Wearing a t-shirt with a photo of a Daily Telegraph front page with the headline ‘Trans women are not women’, Linehan is unrepeentent in his trans views that have led to such a backlash
Meanwhile his arrest has prompted debate about whether Britain is a country where free speech is tolerated, in this case in a tweet on X by Conservative MP Neil O’Brien
If I had come out here three or four years earlier, I would have been working, back with something on air by now.’
He added: ‘But stupidly, I stuck it out in the UK because I felt some residual affection and nostalgia for the place. And it was silly. I should have gone much, much earlier, because this is just a free country, in a way that the UK has ceased to be.
‘From the very start…the reaction was as if we said something completely outlandish. But it’s obvious, if you have female only spaces and a man is in them, that’s going to be a problem.
‘And no one believes you. And you end up shouted at on Newsnight. It’s insane — How did they not recognize that this was going to be an issue?
‘Same with sports, it’s going to be problem. We’re gonna have men beating up women in the ring. Sure enough, at the last Olympics, two men beat up women in the ring. And we all watched it like it was normal.’
As for the future, his forecast was bleak: ‘My worry is that we will just be running on the spot while our cowardly politicians refuse to actually address important issues.
‘As long as no-one’s backing up the Supreme Court and saying ‘Yeah, you got to make sure that these places are properly policed and women don’t feel uncomfortable,’ unless someone in power is saying that, we’re just going to constantly have these arguments, and people are still going to end up in court, because people like Keir Starmer have left the scene.’
He highlighted the ongoing employment tribunal case of Scottish nurse Sandy Peggie, who was suspended from her job at a Kirkcaldy hospital by NHS Fife after she claimed that sharing a female changing room with transgender woman Dr Beth Upton amounted to unlawful harassment.
Said Linehan: ‘Keir Starmer ran on the promise of ending the culture war, but he didn’t do that. He just hides from it and he lets ordinary people like Sandy Peggie fight it.’
Last month a report by the US Department of State accused the UK of backsliding on human rights over its treatment of free speech.
The report identified ‘specific areas of concern’ regarding political speech that was deemed to be ‘hateful’ or ‘offensive’.
The response to comments about the Southport attacks last July, where three young girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift dance class by 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana, was an ‘especially grievous example of government censorship’.
Linehan said that his cancellation and the sudden financial insecurity caused by his trans views caused the collapse of his marriage of 16 years to Helen Serafinowicz (pictured)
The report said: ‘Censorship of ordinary Britons was increasingly routine, often targeted at political speech’.
Mr Siri specializes in lawsuits for people who claim they have been harmed by vaccines. According to the New York Times, he even once petitioned the US government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.
Linehan appears to be following the footsteps of other Brits like Russell Brand, the actor and comedian who left the UK after a slew of controversies – in his case being accused of sexual assault and rape, which he denies – and found a more receptive audience in the US.
Brand is living in Southern Florida and regularly appears in MAGA circles, including events at the President’s estate in Palm Beach.
